Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Fulton: He seemed anxious to help me and other Americans. Asked me, ‘What can I do to help?’ I said, ‘For instance, you can ask Ordóñez to let me serve in one of his fights as sobresaliente [understudy].’ He said, ‘You’re an American and I’m an American. If I can help I will.’ Two days later he told me Ordóñez had said, ‘Sobresaliente is for boys who are down and out.’ But Hemingway said, ‘This is a good fighter,’ so Ordóñez agreed. ‘I’ll set it up for Ciudad Real.’ I waited and the Ciudad Real date came and went. Then I had a letter from Hemingway’s secretary telling me that Hotchner, who had never faced a bull, had got the job as sobresaliente. That fight was important to me … could have been very important in my career. It was disgusting to learn that such a mockery had been made of bullfighting.

  Quintana: In the last year Ernesto was the prisoner of the people around him. But he still behaved with gracia. The people of Pamplona loved him.

  Vanderford: But Hemingway could be ungracious too. Back in 1929 a little old lady … A retired schoolteacher, I’d guess. She approached him and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, I saw my first bullfight this afternoon and frankly I didn’t like it as well as I thought I would from reading your description.’ He could easily have replied, ‘Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,’ or something neutral like that. But he asked, ‘How much did you pay for your ticket?’ She said, ‘Three hundred pesetas.’ He pulled some bills from his pocket, thrust them at her and said, ‘Here’s your money.’ She wouldn’t accept it.

  Quintana: On the other hand, people who were jealous of him were always trying to make scenes. They didn’t know him, so they said he was a drunk and a fighter.

  Vavra: I found that out when I tried to track down the truth about the famous incident with Matt Carney. In a bar I heard some guy saying, ‘Matt Carney tried to drink a toast with Hemingway, but the old man grabbed the bota, threw it a mile and cursed Matt vilely.’ This didn’t sound like the Hemingway I knew, so I asked around to get the true story. Seems Hemingway was giving a party and Matt tried to barge in. He was drunk and abusive, but Hemingway treated him gently and said, ‘I can’t drink with you now.’ It was Carney who used the foul language, not Hemingway. Matter of fact, Hemingway tried to ease him away so the cops wouldn’t arrest him. That’s how they slander Hemingway in Spanish bars.

  Vanderford: Michener still hasn’t said what he thinks about the Hotchner book.

  Michener: In our family it caused a brouhaha. Mari, as the wife of a writer, sided with Mary Hemingway. She thought the book was an unwarranted and inaccurate invasion of privacy and she wanted the courts to forbid its publication, even though it was our own publisher, Random House, who was defending the right to publish. Mari told Bennett Cerf, ‘I side with the enemy.’ I felt the opposite. Hemingway was a public figure and relevant facts about him should not be held from the public. I take my attitude on such matters from the Supreme Court decision in the case where some jerk called Senator Joe Clark a Communist. Clark sued for libel, and the Court held that when Clark entered the race for the Senate he offered himself as a public figure, which made him fair game for anything anyone wanted to say against him, so long as it wasn’t part of a malicious conspiracy.

  Vanderford: How does this apply to Hemingway?

  Michener: Hemingway went to great lengths to constitute himself a public figure and Hotchner had every right to comment about the operation.

  Vanderford: Even about the suicide?

  Michener: Especially the suicide. Hemingway’s whole public life was dedicated to the creation of a legend. And a legend with certain implications. Therefore, the suicide must not be seen as the act of a casual individual but as the culmination of a carefully prepared legend. Now, either the final act was in conformity with legend or it wasn’t.

  Vanderford: What do you think?

  Michener: I’ve told you I wanted it printed.

  Vavra: But when it was printed? What then? Because of its errors it’s a betrayal of friendship. On the part of a guy who, it seems to me, had never really understood or known Hemingway. If you’re going to do something like that you have to do it right. Tell the whole story and be honest about it.

  Michener: Maybe that’s why I liked it. It was a legend about a legend. As I read it I said, ‘Hotchner gives me a picture of Hemingway the brawler, the boaster, the race-track tout, the Cuban exile. But he doesn’t give me one glimpse of the man who wrote the great books.’

  Vavra: How can you say that’s good?

  Michener: Because I think the lives of writers are like that. I think that now and then the public should see the terrifying contradictions. I can’t get out of my mind an interview that Time magazine carried with Hemingway. They played it up like the word of God, and one part especially they carried in a box … for effect … Hemingway saying that as long as man’s juices were running he was in good shape … and boasted to the world that his were still running. Very sexy. Very tough. But at the end of the Hotchner book we are shown a pitiful man who confesses that his juices have stopped running … nothing in life … no sex … no fun … so he blows his brains out. I’ve got to compare him with men like Verdi and Michelangelo and Hokusai, who never talked tough but who did their best work when they were old, old men. To them there was something superior to the running of juices.

  Quintana: You’re wrong when you say he committed suicide. I don’t believe that. Not long before he died I had a wire from Ketchum, Idaho. From Ernesto, saying he wanted the best seats at Pamplona. He planned to be with us, that I know. Of course, he’d been drinking too much and had been told to stop. But not suicide. That wasn’t in his mind.

  Fulton: On the day the news came over the wire I went out to see Juan Belmonte and told him, ‘Don Ernesto just committed suicide,’ and Belmonte said, very slowly and very clearly, ‘Well done.’ In Belmonte’s autobiography there’s a long passage about how Belmonte had wavered about committing suicide in 1915. Had an obsession about it, and Hemingway knew this. Anyway, a little while later Belmonte, the greatest of them all … Well, he shot himself the same way. Right though the head.

  Quintana: And you, Michener, what did you think?

  Michener: I think he acted properly. He had built himself into a legend and when it showed signs of blowing up in his face he ended it with distinction. An act in harmony with the legend. He proved he was as tough as he had claimed to be.

  Vavra: Then you knew it was suicide?

  Michener: How could it have been anything else? Remember that time Hemingway came through Madrid incognito? Insisted he wanted no publicity. Big beard. Baseball cap. Hunting jacket. Wherever he went those six or eight bodyguards clearing the way for him. It was the most conspicious literary disguise since Leo Tolstoy used to go around in his muzhik’s costume. And you could see he loved every phony minute of it. But such performances run the risk of blowing up. And when his threatened to do so, he had the gracia to end the legend with a splendid gesture. The best thing about the suicide was that it was artistically right. And I’m damned sure he realized it.

  Matt Carney.

  I left the dinner party and wandered back to the square, where by purest chance someone said, ‘That’s Matt Carney over there. You want to get the straight dope about his fight with Hemingway?’

  It was in this way that I met the legendary Carney, a forty-year-old California Irishman who, his friends are convinced, will become a first-rate novelist. Many years ago he came to Europe to finish a book but as he was knocking about Paris he was spotted by an agent whose job it was to find male models for advertising. Carney had the rugged New World look of a Mississippi gambler, and French advertisers flocked to him in such numbers that he earned a great deal of money. He was conned into posing for high-fashion ads and soon found himself the pin-up boy of Paris. For the past seven years he had been working on a novel, Run Out of Time, but had been somewhat sidetracked by the purchase of a bar in Torremolinos. He loved Spain and spoke like a drunken angel, with fiery Irish eloquence, and a
s he approached my table I saw that his handsome features were marked by a colossal black eye, which made him doubly Irish and doubly handsome.

  ‘Who hung the mouse on you?’ I asked.

  ‘A Basque woodchopper with a right hand of phenomenal speed. But as I went down I had the presence of mind to kick him in the balls and when he doubled up I knocked out one of his front teeth. So now he’s a Basque woodchopper with a phenomenal right and one missing tooth.’

  A habitué of the bar ran up with a set of photographs from that morning’s running of the bulls, and the photographers had caught Matt in regulation Pamplona costume of white shirt, white pants, red scarf and sash and ropesoled shoes, running about six inches in front of the horns of a massive bull. Later pictures in the sequence showed him flat on his face, with bulls, oxen and people running over him. A final shot showed him up and grinning, with his fantastic black eye.

  ‘A very fine run,’ he said as he studied the photographs, but in his opinion it did not equal the one which some photographer had caught four years ago in color film. Matt had a copy of the postcard which was now sold in Pamplona souvenir shops. It showed him sprinting for life ahead of a bewildered bull whose left horn was about to toss him far and wide.

  ‘He gave me a neat six-inch scratch which wasn’t particularly dangerous, but could have been.’ I suggested that judging from the photographs, he must carry quite a few horn wounds on his hungry-looking body. ‘Nope. I’ve been lucky. But I do have this one to muzzle those clowns in Paris who sit around cafés explaining how to run the bulls at Pamplona.’

  ‘How many years you been coming here?’

  ‘This is my fourteenth. The running this morning was fine. Not great. Bulls couldn’t catch-up with the runners. But it would have to be graded fine.’

  ‘Would you tell me what happened with Hemingway?’

  ‘Will you treat it with respect?’

  ‘In your words.’

  He ordered a beer, sat back, fingered the edge of his eye and said, ‘I revere Hemingway. And years ago I revered him even more. So this evening at San Fermín, I was sitting here, where you are, and he was over there, where Orson Welles is sitting now. He was with the elite of the feria, everyone important, and I looked like a real bum. Drunker than I am now. He had done some of the good writing of our generation. I’d done nothing more permanent than a popcorn fart in a typhoon. So I grabbed my bota, staggered over to his table and shouted, “Hemingway, you old bastard, have a drink with me.” Mary Hemingway said, “Please don’t. He’s drunk.” So I shouted, “Drunk or sober, Hemingway, have a drink with me,” so he grabbed the bota, wound up and threw it as far as he could. It landed on a truck in the street, and I announced in a loud clear voice, “Mr. Ernest Hemingway, fuck you!” At this he brushed Mary away, leaped to his feet and began cursing me. He lunged at me and I was going to break him in half, fat old man that he was, but two Swedes dragged me away, and that night when I got back to my room I wrote a letter to him and said, “Mr. Hemingway, I revere you as one of the fine writers of my generation and I am overcome with remorse that I should have behaved in such a way. Please forgive me.” I gave the letter to Peter Buckley, who did that great book on bulls in Spain, and he delivered it to Hemingway, but Big Dave who was there at the time, told me that Hemingway took one look at the letter, sneered and tore it up. He was real big talking about brawls and that, but when he had one in his lap he didn’t know what to do nor how to end it. To me Ernest Hemingway is a crock of shit.’

  Once a year, and once only, the citizens of Pamplona are not limited in the amount they drink or where they drink it or where they sleep it off.

  The one good eye that I could see was steely blue and the craggy face was resolute. The sandy hair, with a few streaks of gray, was tousled and the faded red scarf was pinned at the neck with the diagonal shields of San Fermín. At the edge of his shirt a jagged horn scar showed across his chest.

  ‘The scar? How’d you get it?’

  ‘I have this crazy thing. All year long, when I’m working in Paris, I keep thinking of Pamplona. San Fermín. To run, to touch, to feel the horn tips edging closer.’

  ‘Is it something mystical?’ I asked.

  Matt looked at me as if I were out of my mind. ‘Christ, you miss the whole flaming point. It’s fun! It’s joy!’ He showed me a photograph from the morning paper and I suppose that in years to come this shot will often be seen in books, for there was Matt galloping a few inches ahead of the steers and bulls, alone and laughing his Irish head off. It was as lovely a portrait of man’s inherent nonsense as I had ever seen. ‘I run the bulls for joy, which is the chief ingredient in generosity. In this way I prove that I have the capacity to give myself whole hog to some activity.’

  ‘Do you run to prove your bravery?’ I asked, for in recent years the most courageous acts at Pamplona had been Matt’s.

  ‘To stand in the street before the run begins … to visualize the bulls coming at you … to sense what might happen … yes, that takes courage. But when those rockets go off and the black shapes come tumbling at you … Hell, you’ve already made your commitment and all it takes now is a sense of joy … to be part of the stampede.’

  ‘Yet you think that Hemingway was a crock of crap?’

  ‘I must. He glorified this sort of thing, but when it came to him, face to face with a bota of red wine, he didn’t know how to handle it. No gracia. No understanding. A good writer. Not the greatest man. But a good writer.’

  In this book I have tried to keep the focus on Spain and Spaniards rather than upon the experiences and opinions of foreign visitors. I have filed away those diverting accounts of what happened to a German in Córdoba or to an Englishman in Badajoz, but in this material on Pamplona during San Fermín, I must speak of foreigners, because the city is crammed with them and it is what happens to them that makes the festival intriguing. If three beautiful Swedish girls of nineteen can find no place to sleep but in the street, one cannot ignore them, nor can he close his eyes to a sports car filled with six handsome juniors from the University of California, three girls, three boys, who sleep sitting in their car near a main intersection.

  I am not, however, going to deal with the young punks who have come here for a sexual holiday; what with the shortage of beds in Pamplona they could do better elsewhere. Nor am I concerned about the various groups who look at one running of the bulls, attend one bullfight and spend the rest of their time at LSD and marijuana parties. What I am involved with are these lineal descendants of Ernest Hemingway and his fictional characters who four decades ago discovered the high hilarity of San Fermín, which through the years has not diminished.

  To understand the magic of Pamplona one must follow the passage of a typical day. The feria, which regularly starts on July 7, San Fermín Day, is billed throughout Spain as the festival of the bulls, signifying that for once in the mean and ugly world of bullfighting the animal himself, known as the only element in the fight that has not been corrupted, is meant to be king. And in a sense he is.

  Shortly before midnight, in the darkened streets of the lower part of town where barricades have been erected to form a runway, the bulls for the next day’s fight are turned loose from the reception pens known as the Corrales de Gas, run across the river on a narrow bridge, then up the steep hill to the temporary corral at the bottom of the Calle Santo Domingo, where they will spend the rest of the night. It is an eerie thing to see the hurrying bulls loom through the darkness and rush past on almost silent hoofs. They are frightened by the dash across the bridge and uncertain about the rush up the hill, so they run with concentrated purpose, like ghosts who have little time for their night journey. A rush, the rattle of hoofs on paving stones, an echo of panting, the clean, lingering smell of animals on the night air and they are gone, mysteriously and with a sense of great drama.

  From midnight, with the bulls now safely in their corral, until six o’clock in the morning, when the bands begin to play in all parts of town, Pamp
lona is a dream city. At the Bar Txoco on the square, customers from Scandinavia and Germany, delighted to be again where there is warmth, sit all night at small tables drinking beer. At the next bar my degenerate waiter whispers, ‘Shift over to this table, and I can serve you.’ With every order the Swedes give him, he pours one for himself, and for the whole eight days he will be drunk. In cars parked throughout the city, boys from Harvard and girls from Wellesley sleep on back seats, wrapped in blankets. Bank lobbies have been thrown open by the police, and college students from Oxford and the Sorbonne sleep on the marble, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl, right up to the teller’s cage. Others, not lucky enough to get into the banks, sleep on the sidewalks; and in the public square by the bandstand, hundreds lie on benches or on the grass. The town is a vast open-air dormitory, and each sleeper has about his throat the red scarf of San Fermín and in his hand a bota of red wine.

  At a quarter to six bands playing the music of Navarra start circulating through all parts of the city, wakening both those who slept in beds and those who did not. If the sleeper is fortunate he is awakened not by a brass band but by one of the three-man groups consisting of two playing antique oboes and one beating a drum, for if there is sweeter music on earth I have not heard it. The sound that comes from these old oboes is like the whispering of a thousand birds at dawn; it is the fairy music that elves dance to; it is the Middle Ages captured in haunting notes; and long after all else in Pamplona has been forgotten, these delicious sounds will echo in the memories of men and women in small towns in Norway and Peru, those who were wakened at Pamplona by the oboes. I once had a record of them on their morning rounds, and at a house party in southern Spain I would occasionally play it on the gramophone, and those in the audience who had not known the music at San Fermín would ask, ‘What’s that wailing?’ But those who had wakened to it during the feria would have tears in their eyes.